Saturday, February 16, 2013
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Some sources including Reuters speculate – or spread rumors – that Barack Obama is considering a nuclear physicist at MIT, Ernest Moniz, as a replacement for Steven Chu.

I don't think I have ever met him. His CV reveals that he's worked both on nuclear power and nuclear weapons. He is a nuclear bull. His publication record is non-empty yet modest – surely relatively to e.g. Steven Chu.

Moniz is a "nuclear bull" but the true underlying reason for this fact is less encouraging. He is the director of an institute that gets funding from BP, Chevron, and Saudi Aramco. Before you rejoice, I must tell you that it is MIT's "Energy Initiative" that wants to fight against climate change. Sadly, you see what sort of garbage the oil companies actually fund when they're not doing the business they're supposed to do.

At Harvard, I actually attended some sessions at which this MIT's "Energy Initiative" was described and discussed. People like me had to suffer through so much boring and utterly idiotic junk of this kind!

And I don't even have to count the green spam in the e-mail coming from all sorts of redundant bureaucrats, proposing green events of various kinds, turning off the lights, and celebrating how green Harvard was all the time. And I knew that whenever I would point out what staggeringly deluded assholes all these people were, I would be told it wasn't the right thing to say, blah blah blah, and they would use all conceivable tools and intimidation to shut my mouth. It was simply horror.

At any rate, with a climate alarmist hybridized with a nuclear bull who is affiliated with MIT, I would have mixed feelings about this possible future U.S. energy secretary. And there's one extra silver lining here: Moniz is actually a fracking supporter.

The previous Undersecretary of Science @DoE was Dr Stephen Koonin (MIT PhD Nuclear Physics), BS Caltech), who previously held the BP post of "Chief Scientist". I believe he was "sent" there from Caltech

[ where he was Physics prof & Provost, working in conjunction with Vice Provost Dr David Goodstein (wrote the alarmist book "Out of Gas", warning of fossil fuel finite-ness) on catalyzing Old Oil into Alternative Fuels, also Physics..the guy (U of Washington PhD) who was interviewed by Feynman in the strip club ]

to "move" Old Oil (stuck like a beached whale). Koonin left in 2011, he was unhappy (due to lack of power to do anything constructive). With Chu leaving, as well as Dr Marcia McNutt (former MIT Geophysics prof) at USGS, there seems to be an alarming trend of "brain drain"

I think these intelligent Academics ("brains")realized the FUTILITY of US Govt bureaucracy ("boneheads" aka "boners").

The current Caltech President (Jean Chameau,former Georgia-Tech Provost where my former grad school office-mate Dr Steve Cross was Vice President, now Exec VP of Research) has a bunch of Green Initiatives @Caltech (solar power), due to his wife Dr Carolyn Carmichael, who led an Sustainable Energy Inst @Georgia-Tech.

There is a valid "core" (energy independence from foreign oil monopoly), but some questionable "crust" ("feel good" Green initiatives), as you pointed out.